Homebrewing: News and Reminisces

Homebrewing is a great hobby. While I haven’t brewed a batch at home in a long while, I still have fond memories of triple-decocting my way through a Saturday. The smell of the sweet wort, the condensation on the window panes, the water gushing through my dining room from a burst hose on my heat exchanger…those were the days. The only reason I no longer homebrew is because I get to make whatever kind of beer I want at the Pump Station.

While it takes a bit of knowledge and practice to become a proficient brewer, one can make pretty decent beer right from the start if you follow a few simple rules. One could buy any number of books to learn about beginning homebrewing, but why do that when you can take a brewing class? There’s one coming up in Troy at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, 265 River Street. The August 18th class will be taught by Roger Savoy, owner of Hennessey Homebrew Emporium.

Class is from 6:30-9:00 p.m. and costs $41 for Arts Center members and $45 for the rest of the world. Call them at (518) 273-0552 or visit this website for more info.

On to something to keep the post (mildly) interesting: homebrewing can be a messy hobby. The aforementioned flood in my dining room was, unfortunately, not fiction. As a homebrewer, I was always searching for ways to make my day more efficient. While I have a decent brain in my cranium, it doesn’t work quite as fast as I would like at times. This was one of those times.

While being bored numb at my old day job as a chemist, I found myself pondering my hobby (this happened a lot). I was thinking about all the water I was wasting when cooling my wort from boiling to fermentation temperature (65F or so). Much like a commercial brewer, I used what is known as a counter-flow heat exchanger to chill my wort. It’s basically a tube inside a larger diameter tube. Cold water goes in one end of the wider tube while hot wort enters the narrow tube at the opposite end. At the other end I collected cool wort, but the hot water just went down the drain (in a commercial brewery the hot water is put into a holding tank for later use). There had to be something I could do with the water!

Somehow I came up with the idea of watering my garden with it. I ran a hose from the end of my heat exchanger out a window to my backyard, where I grew hops as well as more typical vegetables like tomatoes and arugula. I hooked up the heat exchanger hose to one of those porous black rubber hoses that are made from shredded tires; I think they’re called weep hoses or something. The source of cold water was a hose bib in my basement.

My biggest concerns about this arrangement were that I wouldn’t get enough water flow to cool the wort and/or that I’d cook the garden if the effluent was too hot. I don’t know if either of these things would have happened, because I never even got that far.

At the end of the boil I dutifully whirled my wort to settle out the trub and then went down the rickety old stairs to my basement to turn on the water. I climbed the stairs back to the kitchen and stepped into the dining room were the heat exchanger was set up near a window. The water hoses on it were in obvious distress, bulging in a very threatening manner. Just as I reached out to see how taut the hose felt, it burst.

You really don’t appreciate just how much water flows from a garden hose until it’s doing so in your dining room. Unimpeded by anything like a nozzle, water gushed everywhere. My dog, a black lab named Milo who really loved water, jumped with excitment. “George doesn’t usually do this!” I imagined him thinking as he pranced around the room.

Once my brain regained the ability to function, I flew down the rickety old steps and shut the valve. I turned around to see the water raining into the basement through the floor above. How handy: my 80-year-old house had loose enough floor boards that the dining room drained almost completely!

Fortunately, I was living alone at the time. A significant other might have forbidden future brewing projects after such a fiasco. I may not have turned pro had my amateur career ended at that point.

Do any of you have a fun homebrewing story to share? Maybe somebody out in cyberland can help make me feel a bit less stupid…

14 Responses

I boil my wort in the garage with propane and keep the door open for ventilation. One winter a nice sub-zero wind picked up while I was boiling (I had a brewing itch and couldn’t wait for a warmer day). To shelter myself and the burner I lowered the door a little bit. While lowering it several screws in the door popped out and fell into the kettle. Not caring the least bit about the door I started thinking the worst about contamination. When the batch finished there were no signs of infection. I suppose the screws weren’t any different than putting my immersion chiller in the kettle 15 minutes before the end of the boil to sterilize it?

Other than that, I’ve burned myself a few times spilling fair amounts of mash and sparge water. Maybe homebrewers are just accident prone.

Don’t be too apprehensive. My first three batches were extract. The first one was a mildly hopped sort of pale ale, and it was good. The next two batches were terrible; I was being far too experimental given my lack of knowledge. I then read a lot about brewing and stepped right up to all-grain. The very first batch was good!

The keys: use a real mash tun (as opposed to a colander) so that you have a chance of hitting your target gravity and use a real mill (or have the grain milled by someone reliable) so that you have a chance of hitting your target gravity.

Even more important is to pitch a lot of healthy yeast, oxygenate the wort, and control pitching and fermentation temperature. If you don’t know what any of that means, you’re not ready to brew.

Once when I was cooling my wort in an ice bath in the sink, I grabbed a pizzeria menu off the top of my fridge to order a pizza. Figured out what I wanted, set the menu on the counter, and went into the living room to order.

While I was in the living room watching tv/waiting for my wort to cool, the wind must have blew through my kitchen window and picked up the menu and placed it in my wort.

It got me scared a bit, since I know thats once of the best times to infect you’re beer. It was probably sitting in there for about 10 minutes or so. Beer ended up being just fine in the end!

If I tried to recount the methodology behind last October’s brew day for what can only be called “Unrepeatable Tripel” it would scare others from ever giving home brewing a go. Lets just say the mash was too damn high, and then I learned that only a fraction of cool/cold water is needed to get the mash too damn low. After which you need to come up with an emergency heat the mash method. I inadvertently did some sort of quasi step mash, which is quite unnecessary with the quality of malt today.

Nevertheless “Unrepeatable Tripel” was born. I will never brew it again though, I just don’t have that kind of planned panic in the cards.

My first batch I did I had at least 3 boil overs…good thing I was brewing outside

This past February when I was home during one of the big snow storms we had I was brewing a Cascadian Dark Ale and decided to just take the brewpot outside and chill the wort in a snow drift just outside the door

This past Sunday I bottled my Rhubarb Raspberry Wheat and well some of the Rhubarb didn’t get totally pureed so when was clogging up my bottling wand it was not allowing it to close when I pulled it out bottle…luckily I had a towel down to catch most of the spillage…but still took awhile to clean up the floor

I recently tried to make a ginger shandy using fresh ginger root. i used a normal kitchen grater to get all the ginger into the mixture. once i was all done i looked down at my hand and saw that i grated most of my exposed thumb nail into the pot. it turned out fine and i just called it “thumbnail ginger ale.” i only told my wife about it after she tried some and so far none of my friends have had any complaints either.

Other than the couple of boil overs I had when I was first starting out and doing extract batches on the stove, I would have to say the worst mess I ever made was a double IPA I brewed that I pitched onto a yeast cake of WLP007 on a Sunday night. When I left for work the next morning the air lock was bubbling like a champ. When I got home krausen was pouring out of hole in the lid of the fermenter, was all over the room, as well as dripping off the ceiling! Air lock got plugged until enough pressure built up to blow it off. Exploding fermenter. Since then it has always been a blow off tube when pitching any wort on a yeast cake!

my neighbor and I started brewing last february, we’ve made at least 9 different ales so far, ALL have been outstanding. We use the water from the springs in Saratoga, and invested in a great book of clones. Currently, we bottle, but are looking into C02. But since we like giving some away, bottling seems to be the way to go.

Also, we have planted 4 bines of hops in the yard, and all have climbed up the fences rather nicely. I believe we have Kent Goldings, Willamette, Liberty & Nugget. Do you suggest starting out easy with the fresh hops by say… dry hopping with them? We are a little weary of using fresh hops in the boil since we have never done it before.. any tips on how using fresh hops compared to the packages pellets works? And of course, there can’t be any way to tell what the acid levels are an them.. right?

Using fresh hops in any capacity other than dry-hopping would be sort of a waste; the heat will drive off the most volatile oils that make fresh hops special. Don’t use them for bittering: as you said, you don’t know their alpha content. Lab analysis is a tad expensive.

Keep in mind that you can fill bottles from kegs, so you can still share beer with others.

I am extremely interested in taking up homebrewing (after living in Seattle where my friends were all homebrewers) and plan to start brewing soon. I was wondering if there is any sort of homebrewers group/guild/club in the Albany area? My friends in Seattle have a guild (The Capitol Hill Urbanbrewers Guild or C.H.U.G.) that meets about every month to share their homebrews and discuss brewing. It would be nice to be part of something similar here.

Thanks for the tips. We are going to dry hop with the hops we got this season. They’ve been vaccuum packed for our next IPA. and we are planning a nice winter warmer currently, a clone of sam smiths winter welcome. Have a Scotch ale sitting. We did a clone of Stone IPA, holy cow, we are at about 9%, what a beating! lol .. love it. Came out really nice.

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